How Do You Become A Writer?

"Where do I seriously and honestly begin?"

By doing two things. Oh, there are bells and whistles you can tack on, but in the end there are just two essentials.

You must read. And you must write. Writers learn by doing.

There is indeed a formula you can follow when writing a novel. Essentially, you have (1) a character who (2) wants to accomplish something but (3) finds himself opposed by (4) an antagonist.

That's it. There are endless variants, but the basic novel structure follows one or more characters, who have goals which are difficult to obtain, because someone is opposing them.

Each chapter follows (1) a character (2) who attempts to achieve a goal and (3) succeeds, fails, or succeeds with a complication. The character then (4) reacts, (5) reassesses, and (6) decides on a new course of action.

Again. There are variants, but you'll find that those show up most of the time.

Short stories also have a formula. (1) A character (2) faces a problem and (3) attempts to solve it; the reader may or may not see the result.

Now, your career -- whether you're a student in high school, a computer programmer, a carpenter, a woodcutter -- has already taught you many of the skills you will need to become a writer. The programmer must know from personal experience that reading a text on Perl and actually writing a program in Perl are two different activities; the woodcutter must know that selecting which trees to cut and actually hauling the felled trees away to the mill are similarly different. And no matter how old you are, or how long you've been writing, you know that long and complicated projects must often be worked on in bits and pieces. In short, you will not always finish in an hour or a day.

And you know that one's ability increases with time spent practicing. This is a fact that many, many just-starting writers (and not a few up-and-coming writers) do not yet have ingrained.

You already have an end goal: you want to be a writer. I don't know whether you're interested in being published in pro magazines, or if you want to write a book (or several), or if you want to be well-thought-of by your readers. In any case, your goal gives you a measure by which to judge your progress. And, obviously, you can adjust your subgoals as you get a feel for how much time you have or are willing to spend working toward your end goal.

Goal: Be a writer
Possible Subgoal: Write and finish a story.
Possible Subgoal: Write and finish one story each week.
Possible Subgoal: Write, finish, and send out one story each week to a paying magazine or ezine.
Possible Subgoal: Loosely outline or mentally plan a book, begin writing, set a reasonable word goal per day or per week.
Possible Subgoal: Outline a series of related stories or novellas, start writing, and every time you get feedback on Story A or Story B, apply it to the next story so you never get trapped in Endless Revision Limbo.

Any of these, all of these, are options. The point is to write. Writing is itself practice for future writing. And initial talent has little to do with one's future success. What matters is whether you persevere.

The rest is up to you, because every writer is different (although there are broad trends). Some writers outline extensively; others just start at a place that seems okay and quit writing when the story is done. Some writers revise their work before sending it out; others redraft (write a whole new draft without looking at the first one); still others just read it over once to catch minor grammar and spelling errors before sending it out. That's okay. Every writer is different.

Many writers have a daily writing goal, a wordcount they shoot for. A few writers go weeks or months without writing, then pound out a short story or a book in days or weeks. It's possible to write eleven thousand words in a single day, or to write a publishable book in the space of a week... but not everyone works that way, and it's somewhat dangerous to be a large-gap writer because it means you are writing less, which means putting fewer hours into practicing your craft compared to another writer who puts in three thousand words a day come h*ll or high water.

I am simplifying, it's true. I don't know what your dreams are, whether you want to be on the NYT bestseller list or Amazon's Top 100 Mysteries page. Maybe you want to write a couple short stories and see them published in a professional magazine someday. Maybe you just want to share some of your own original worlds with strangers so that they, too, can trek across the plains of Utmedie or watch the amber-colored webbing of a dragon's wing throw yellow-tinted shadows on the ground below. But for every writer, the key is to write often, to read broadly, and to keep going.

So keep writing, and keep reading. And I wish you the best of luck.